Indie darlings Foster The People have released their double music video feature for “See You In The After Life”/”Feed Me”.
Starring Foster The People lead singer Mark Foster and wife, Emmy-award-winning actor Julia Garner (Ozark, The Fantastic Four: First Steps), the double feature is something very beautiful and weird to behold.
According to Mark Foster, the video’s visuals are “transmissions from somewhere between a fever dream and a digital afterlife. If “See You In The Afterlife” is a satirical take on what life feels like now, “Feed Me” is the hell that follows.”
Directed by Weird Life Films’ Laure Gordon, Jackson James and Ryan Ohm, the double feature opens up with “See You In The After Life”, an upbeat, extremely danceable track featuring Foster The People’s penchant for energetic doom. Mark Foster’s instantly recognisable falsetto sings the headlines got us thinking that we’re all gonna die/then convince us that we have to sell our ticket for the afterlife, all while clean percussion and treble-boosted guitars (Mike Oldfield-style) screech over the top of it.
The first half of the video is a colourful nightmare of bright screens and grotesquely exaggerated masks, as a ticker-tape of increasingly nonsensical news headlines moves across the bottom of the screen. To segue into the second half of the video, for “Feed Me” features Julia Garner perched on a sofa, staring dead-eyed into an old television set in which her husband appears to be trapped.
“Feed Me” is the darker and moodier counterpart to “See You In The Afterlife”, featuring stark percussion and a bouncing bass line, with Mark Foster’s spoken word lyrics strictly digital/let’s be irrational interspersed between chorus lines of feed me all you got/yeah, give me all your love/I’ll be your feel-good machine. The second half of the double feature very much feels like the logical conclusion to the bright, busy visuals of the first half – it’s just Julia Garner and Mark Foster dancing oddly at each other, reaching out to each other with the TV screen stuck between them.
Mark Foster said: “It was interesting to tie these two songs together in a short to explore the two sides of consumption – the dopamine rush of intake, and the void that follows”. Together, they definitely feel like a sugar rush followed by a total crash – in a lush, sultry way that Foster The People does so well.
Both tracks are taken from Paradise State of Mine, which was released by Foster The People last August.
